War Horse painting finally hung in Devon village hall

In the novel, play and now
Steven Spielberg film War Horse, a painting of fictional equine hero Joey hangs in a real-life village hall â except, until today, it didn’t… to the sadness of millions of visitors.

Artist Ali Bannister works on her painting of Joey, the equine star of Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse (Picture: Apex)

So author Michael Morpurgo commissioned an oil painting from equine artist Ali Bannister to ease the lives of the villagers of Iddesleigh.

War Horse tells the fictional tale of Joey, a horse sold to the Army at the outbreak of World War I. It was inspired when Morpurgo met Devon Yeomanry veterans who drank in his Iddesleigh local.

The authorâs note at the beginning of the 1981 book has a fictional account describing the picture of Joey hanging but it was simply a device created by Morpurgo.

And after the National Theatre production first staged in 2006 and the recent news of the Spielberg-directed film, the village has been even more inundated with War Horse enthusiasts.